I receive many enquiries from couples who are close to separation. Sometimes divorce has already been discussed. Sometimes one person has emotionally begun to leave while the other is desperately trying to hold the relationship together. And sometimes both people are simply exhausted. They have tried talking, arguing, giving each other space, making promises and starting again, and they no longer believe that anything is really going to change.
It is not unusual for somebody to arrive at a two-day intensive and say very early in our first conversation:
“It’s over. I want a divorce.”
I don’t necessarily hear that as a final decision. Sometimes it is, of course. But very often what I hear is just how much pain that person is in. They feel helpless and hopeless. They no longer believe they have any influence over what happens between them, and separation has begun to feel like the only remaining way of ending the distress.
That is where we start.
How does a relationship get to breaking point?
Most relationships do not suddenly arrive at the brink of separation.
Couples develop ways of coping with difficulty. They argue and make up. One pursues while the other withdraws. They avoid certain subjects. They focus on the children, work, careers, mortgages or the thousand practical demands of family life.
Sometimes those strategies keep things going for many years. When the children are small, there may simply be no space to look closely at the relationship. Busy careers can provide another distraction. Some couples become very good at functioning together while gradually becoming less emotionally connected.
Eventually, though, the system begins to show cracks. The old ways of coping no longer work. The same arguments become more intense, resentment accumulates, sex or affection disappears, or people begin living increasingly separate lives under the same roof.
Somebody eventually says, “I can’t do this anymore.”
That does not necessarily mean the relationship needs to end. Sometimes the way the couple has been doing the relationship needs to end.
That is an important distinction.
“You are where you need to be”
One of my favourite things to say to distressed couples is:
You are where you need to be as a system.
It is not necessarily a comfortable place to be. In fact, it may be an incredibly painful place to be. But this is where the relationship has arrived.
If you could have done your relationship differently up until now, you probably would have. Both of you have been doing the best you can with the capacity, history, vulnerabilities and ways of protecting yourselves that you have brought into the relationship.
For me, there is something important about beginning with some compassion for that — for yourself and also, where possible, for the person sitting beside you.
That does not mean excusing bad behaviour. Compassion and accountability need to be able to sit alongside each other. Cruelty, dishonesty, contempt, aggression, prolonged withdrawal or other destructive behaviours sometimes need to be called out quite directly.
But simply deciding who is to blame doesn’t tell us very much about how to change a relationship. I am much more interested in understanding how the two of you got here, what keeps happening between you, and what each of you can begin to do differently.
Do we both have to want to save the relationship?
No.
A substantial part of my work is with couples where one person is considerably more hopeful about the relationship than the other. Sometimes one partner has been thinking about leaving for months, or even years, before they finally say it aloud.
My role isn’t to persuade that person to stay. Nor do I assume that because somebody says “I want a divorce” the relationship is necessarily over.
I am interested in what that statement means.
Sometimes it means exactly what it says. At other times, what someone is really saying is:
“I cannot continue living in this relationship in the way that we are living in it now.”
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
When people have been distressed for long enough, they can become exhausted by the relationship itself. They lose confidence that they can influence anything. They have had the same conversation twenty times, perhaps tried therapy before, promised to change and then found themselves back in exactly the same place. Hopelessness begins to make sense.
That is often the psychological place from which “I want to leave” emerges.
Is it too late for couples therapy if we’ve already discussed divorce?
No. The fact that separation or divorce has been discussed tells me something important about the level of distress in the relationship. It doesn’t, by itself, tell me whether repair is still possible.
Sometimes couples are frightened that they have somehow crossed a line by saying the word divorce. I don’t see it that way. What matters much more is what remains between the two people, what has happened to bring them to this point, and whether there is enough willingness to look honestly at the relationship.
I have worked with many couples who began therapy genuinely unsure whether they would remain together. You don’t need to manufacture optimism before you come. In some ways, it is more useful to bring the relationship exactly as it is.
What becomes possible when we have more time?
A couple close to separation usually isn’t dealing with one problem. There may be years of accumulated resentment, loneliness, sexual disconnection, parenting difficulties, betrayal or simply a profound feeling that you don’t understand me anymore.
A two-day intensive gives us enough time to slow some of that down and begin separating what is happening now from everything that has accumulated around it.
Rather than trying to solve every problem, we begin looking underneath the problems. We look at the pattern the two of you keep falling into, what happens when one person becomes hurt or frightened, how the other responds, and why both of you keep ending up somewhere neither of you actually wants to be.
Having more time also means we can stay with something important when it emerges rather than having to put it away because the appointment is ending. We can peel back the layers and get a much fuller sense of what has actually happened to the relationship.
More time does not mean more pressure. There is room to pause, think, settle and come back to something when we need to.
What about injuries from years ago that were never repaired?
One of the things I frequently discover is that the argument happening today is connected to something that happened a very long time ago.
Perhaps there was an affair fifteen years ago. A period when one partner felt abandoned after the birth of a child. A devastating comment that was never properly repaired. A family crisis during which somebody felt completely alone. A sexual rejection or humiliation. A time when one person desperately needed the other and experienced them as absent.
The couple may believe they have moved on.
But the relationship has not.
I sometimes think of these unresolved injuries as a stone in the shoe of the relationship. The couple keeps walking, sometimes for ten or twenty years, but every few steps something hurts.
Because the original injury was never properly understood or repaired, something relatively small in the present can suddenly carry the emotional weight of everything that came before it. Part of our work may be to understand why that old injury is still alive between you and, where possible, begin to repair it.
Isn’t my partner the problem?
You would be surprised how many people arrive at couples therapy with some version of this hope:
If you can just get my partner to understand what they are doing wrong, everything will be okay.
Sometimes one person’s behaviour genuinely is causing considerably more harm than the other’s. Responsibility is not necessarily equal, and good couples therapy should not manufacture a false fifty-fifty.
Where it is safe and appropriate for a couple to work together, however, I am interested in what each person can take responsibility for changing.
That may be criticism, withdrawal, defensiveness, controlling behaviour, avoiding difficult conversations, escalating too quickly, becoming contemptuous, or not expressing vulnerability until it finally comes out as anger. Sometimes it is simply recognising the effect that something you do has repeatedly had on your partner.
I have seen something almost magical happen many times in couples therapy. When one person stops waiting for their partner to change first and takes genuine responsibility for even one small part of their own contribution, the whole system can begin to move.
Their partner suddenly has something different to respond to.
That doesn’t solve the relationship. But the old dance has already changed slightly because one person is no longer taking exactly the same step.
Understanding the cycle rather than finding the guilty person
Couples often arrive believing they have many different problems: money, sex, parenting, in-laws, work, phones, alcohol, household responsibilities, affection or communication.
Those things matter. But underneath them there is often a surprisingly consistent pattern.
One person feels something and reacts. The reaction touches something in their partner, who reacts in their own familiar way. That response then confirms something for the first person and around they go. After enough years together, it can happen incredibly quickly.
Part of my work is to help couples see that pattern while it is actually happening between them. Once we can see the dance, we have a chance of interrupting it.
If I can help a couple become a little less certain about whether they’re right or not, and a little more curious about their partner and their experience, we have somewhere to go.
Instead of “I know exactly why you do that”, there can gradually be enough room to wonder what is actually happening for the other person.
Can couples therapy work if we’ve already tried therapy before?
Absolutely.
A significant number of couples who come to work intensively with me have already tried couples therapy. Sometimes it helped for a while. Sometimes they gained useful insight but struggled to translate it into their relationship. And sometimes the experience left them feeling even more discouraged.
Intensive couples therapy is a different way of working.
For some highly distressed couples, weekly in-person or online therapy can begin to feel like another difficult event associated with the relationship. They arrive activated, spend the session talking about what has gone wrong since the previous week, leave distressed and then return the following week to do it again. Over time, therapy itself can become associated with the relationship being dysfunctional or broken.
That does not mean weekly couples therapy is ineffective. It can be extremely helpful and is the right format for many couples. But some relationships need enough uninterrupted time to get underneath the repeated crisis rather than revisiting it one hour at a time.
Having tried therapy before does not tell me that your relationship cannot change. It tells me something about what you have already tried and gives us useful information about what may need to be different this time.
Can two days save a relationship?
Two days cannot guarantee that a couple stays together.
Nor is that the purpose of an intensive.
What two concentrated days can give us is an opportunity to understand the relationship much more deeply, begin interrupting patterns that may have been operating for years, work with important unresolved injuries and help each person see more clearly what they need to take responsibility for.
Sometimes quite a lot begins to move over those two days. Sometimes what becomes clear is just how much would actually have to change for the relationship to survive.
An intensive can accelerate change without pretending to replace the work that may still need to happen afterwards.
The aim isn’t to manufacture a dramatic reconciliation over two days. It is to find out whether something different can begin to happen between you.
What if we ultimately decide to separate?
Couples therapy is not successful only when a couple remains together.
Sometimes two people understand each other more deeply and decide they want to rebuild. Sometimes one or both realise that they cannot, or do not want to, make the changes the relationship would require.
My role is neither to persuade you to stay together nor to assume that separation is inevitable.
There can be considerable value in arriving at a decision from a place of greater understanding rather than making it in the middle of another devastating argument. And particularly where there are children, being able to understand what has happened between you may matter regardless of whether you ultimately remain a couple.
Considering intensive couples therapy when your relationship is close to breaking point?
Couples on the brink of separation are an important part of my specialist work.
I offer private two-day Intensive Couples Therapy in Galway, Ireland for couples who need more time and space to understand what has happened between them and whether meaningful change is still possible.
You don’t need to know whether your relationship can be saved before you come.
Bring the relationship you actually have. We start there.